Colorado State quarterback Garrett Grayson is helped off the field after being injured during the first half against Air Force. (The Fort Collins Coloradoan, Rich Abrahamson)

FORT COLLINS – In general, Colorado State coach Jim McElwain looks at the injury situation on his team and is satisfied.

“When you look at it, from an injury standpoint, basically five games through your season, it’s really not that bad,” he said. “When you look at what has happened in the past when there were some pretty catastrophic things that occurred throughout the roster.”

And yet this week he’s watching two of his best players — quarterback Garrett Grayson and cornerback Momo Thomas — go under the knife. Grayson underwent surgery Monday morning to repair a broken clavicle. Thomas’ shoulder surgery is set for Wednesday, McElwain said.

Yes, Colorado picked a lousy time to join the Pac-12. In its second year in the league, Colorado finds itself in a conference with six teams in the top 25. That’s the first time the league’s had that many since 2002. That doesn’t include Arizona which was No. 22 until it joined a long line of teams that got steamrolled at Oregon.

The one with the bullet is Oregon State. I don’t think any team in the country has beaten two ranked teams (Wisconsin and UCLA) and another (Arizona) that was in the Top 25, two of the wins coming on the road. The Beavers’ offensive line is vastly improved and in a league packed with great quarterbacks, sophomore Sean Mannion may be having the best year of them all.

New Colorado football commitment Marcus Loud can ask CU defensive line coach Kanavis McGhee if the Buffs assistant remembers their high school fight song.

Loud, a 6-foot-4, 237-pound defensive end, is a senior at Houston’s Wheatley High — the alma mater of McGhee. Loud visited CU this past weekend and, according to Rivals.com, extended a commitment to the Buffs.

In no surprise, McGhee, according to the recruiting-based website, was CU’s primary recruiter for Loud.

At some point today, as I touched on in both a commentary that began on page B1 and a news story on page B6 in this morning’s paper, CSU president Tony Frank will issue a statement, announcing his conditional “go” recommendation on the on-campus stadium project. He’ll officially make that recommendation to the CSU system’s board of governors at the board meeting on the Fort Collins campus later this week, and the board will hear public comment — if there is any — before deciding whether to endorse Frank’s recommendation. (It would be shocking if it doesn’t.)

A note on presentation: I wrote the commentary first, on the assumption the news story was going to be prominently displayed, either on A1 or in the sports section, so it was designed as a complementary piece, reacting to what was disclosed in the news story. Instead, the commentary was ahead of the story, so we put more of a “news” headline on it. So there was some initial confusion from those who thought I gave short shrift to the announcement itself in commenting on an aspect of its ramifications. It comes with high risk and heightened temptations.

I’ve been writing about the stadium issue off and on for months, so I didn’t want to simply plow over the same ground.

I realize — and I assume, so does Tony Frank — the critics of the project will be up in arms today. But it became apparent long ago that while there are reasonable arguments to be made against the stadium, they mostly involve its practicality, impact to the campus itself, and economic reality, and not the NIMBY concerns of Fort Collins and neighborhood residents. Frank defuses some of that with his stipulation that roughly half of the cost must be raised before groundbreaking can begin.

If the groundbreaking is delayed signficantly, and the opening is pushed back to 2016, the only players in the program now who will play in a new stadium are the freshman being redshirted this season.

UPDATED 2 P.M.

As expected, Frank issued his statement this afternoon, sending it as an email to the CSU community and posting it as a message on the school web site.

Terry Frei graduated from Wheat Ridge High School in the Denver area and has degrees in history and journalism from the University of Colorado-Boulder. He worked for the Rocky Mountain News while attending CU and joined the Post staff after graduation. He has also worked at the Oregonian in Portland, Ore., and The Sporting News. His seventh book, March 1939: Before the Madness, was issued in February 2014.